The checkered deck
by theRandomscrolls
Summary: Wonderland is still grey with the ash of the War of the Suits. Alice is not sure if she is dead or dreaming, but she's sure the mark of the Spades upon her back is a target for the soldiers of the Hearts Kingdom and her help is needed should the Wonderkind hope to live free again. Armed with the Vorpal sword and the council of a tea-pot bound Djinn Alice sets out to topple a regime
1. 1-The fall

**First off I would like to say hello and thank you to everyone who is reading this. Welcome.**

**And I have something I want to make clear: this is not a Cardverse fiction. The theme of cards is heavily involved, but this is a fic based on Alice in Wonderland, the original work by Lewis Carroll. The characters from Hetalia will not be in the Suits nor roles they are in in the Cardverse because the Cardverse is not involved with this at all. the sole similarity is the fact that the characters are in suits.  
I have tried to use a lot from the original work. Many of the same ideas and subtext can be found in this fic. The work of Carroll was about a girl growing up and hopefully this fic will carry on that theme, plus the theme of being lost in the great inescapable system. I'll do my absolute to write this fic to the best of my abilities, and in return I ask, dear readership, that you enjoy.**

**Feel free to PM me or leave a review if you're confused by something.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia or Alice in Wonderland. **

Alice is beginning to get very tired of lying in her bed.

Since her arrival in hospital she has been permitted to do very little else. At first she felt privileged to have a private ward, as she would not be required to enter into polite conversation with an optimistic neighbour nor have her own awkward advances scorned by a sour, pessimistic neighbour. Alice is accustomed to being on her own, but not like this. What is the use of being on one's own when one cannot enjoy the solitude? If she could work on the mountain of work from university, or read one of her books, or engage in some other pastime she enjoys then the lack of company would be heartily welcomed. But she cannot.

Over the course of the two weeks she has spent in this gloriously private ward, the solitude has become isolation. With nothing to do but watch the television mounted upon the wall in front of her bed and no view of the outside world except for a few bars of light creeping across the floor of white tile, Alice has become very dull.

_So very dull_, she agrees with herself, staring at her blue-black arm, the muddled white of the cast covering the other and the needle of the drip she underneath the skin of her left wrist.

The TV drones in the background. Should she care to look up, Alice will see the picture of a beautiful young woman wearing a pleasant smile and a headscarf in a loose fashion that allowed a few strands of smoke-black hair to stray across her cheek. Should she care to listen, Alice will hear a newscaster describing the murder of this woman, a promising pre-med who was apparently loved by all who knew her , or all who cared to speak to the journalists about her stabbing Alice might think with a roll of her eyes, had she been listening. However she is not listening, so she is ignorant of the fact that the fifth anniversary of this woman's death has passed and her killer is still at large.

This afternoon seems doomed to join the other nine she has spent conscious in this hospital, passing in a stupid, sleepy haze, broken only by the twice daily visits of a doctor who appears as bored as Alice and the twice nightly visit of a nurse to refresh her painkillers.

"Why is it," she addresses the ceiling "One feels exhausted after a day spent doing absolutely nothing? Should I not be buzzing with energy? Or is my body using the energy to repair my…my…blast it, what did the car do to me anyway?"

The car had been a white blur when it hit her. The whole unfortunate affair was much too fast to avoid- for Alice at any rate. Believing herself to be safe on the pavement she had not been wary of the driver losing control behind her. In fact she had not known she had any company on her walk home from the university, not until the company had veered onto the sidewalk, struck her, thrown her a modest distance and sped off once the driver realised what he or she had done. Alice is willing to bet it was a he; in her experience men rarely take responsibility for accidents.

When she had first awoken to dreary reality, the doctors had explained a long list of injuries the car had inflicted. Many abrasions, bruises, a ruptured vein for which they had inserted a device called a 'stent', which was something like a metal straw that prevented her vein from collapsing to Alice's understanding, a broken bone in her right arm and a few more details she cannot remember. Her left arm has been locked up in a heavy cast of white plastered bandages. The cast has not done much more for her than become very troublesome in the bathtub, necessitating the use of a white sheet of plastic around it while she bathed herself with the help of a nurse who laughs at every word spoken between them.

"If I ever meet the bastard who landed me here I'll take a pipe to him." she decides. Alice derives most of her entertainment in hospital through a series of fantasies that are more and more complicated each time she revisits them. For example in one world she recovers, but must lose her broken arm lest the rest of her body be consumed by a terrible gangrene. The doctors fit her with an advanced robotic arm, equipped with protective equipment and weapons to ensure Alice has a better chance of defending herself from accidents. She leaves the hospital and hunts down the man who ran her down, then tests her arm's abilities on the man. Lately this world is the popular escape.

In all likelihood if Alice did indeed meet the man who had hit her, then left her in the street for a pedestrian to find half an hour later, she would only berate him for his actions then press charges. At best she will receive some kind of cash compensation then be expected to be satisfied.

She glances at the table beside her bed. There sits a book, lent to her by the library cart pushed by a dumpy old woman who trembled so badly with the effort to push it, Alice is always tempted to offer her the bed. The book is thick. She has not read it before and is not likely to finish it. Inside, the pages are solid text broken by very few conversations. This book is meant to satirise a subject she has not quite identified and where she thinks it might be poignant and clever to include one, there are no illustrations. She brushes away the notion of a fresh attack upon the dull contents, dismissing it as another way to waste her time.

Alice is disgusted to find herself staring at the clock, willing the hands to pass quickly and strike the four, when her doctor is due for the afternoon check-up. Surely she is not so desperate for a conversation she wishes for her bored, cold doctor? She scoffs, both at the thought of the grey doctor and at herself for wishing for his companionship.

And yet when the knock at the door comes, at a quarter past four, Alice cannot help but feel a thrill of relief the doctor is coming after all.

"Yes?" she says, intending it as permission to enter.

Unexpectedly, it is not her doctor that opens the door at all. Instead it is an exceptionally tall woman, who has to duck under the door to get through. She is dressed in a white coat, a standard silver doctor's watch hanging from the pocket, and a pair of white trainers. Her hair at first appears white in the sunlight until she moves away from the bars cast upon the walls from the blinds, then Alice realises her hair is a pale blonde, not quite white. There certainly is a lot of it. The braid she has bound her hair up in is frayed in several places, little spirals of not-quite white dripping over her shoulders. The woman's face is striking, one because of her slightly larger-than-normal nose and two because of her beauty. There is something rather regal and intimidating about her and at the same time, something very inviting.

One more thing: this woman is hurt. Her left hand is bandaged up.

"I must apologise for my lateness," the new doctor says and checks her watch, on which the numbers are reversed "A meeting overran."

Alice stares for a good few seconds before it occurs to her the new doctor awaits a reply "Well I'm not in any pain because of it."

"Excellent. I imagine the main cause of your pain would be the silly driver who thought it fit to mow down a perfectly respectable-looking young girl and leave her bleeding in the street. Silly man. Let's hope something exceedingly unpleasant happens to him, _da_?"

Distracted as she is by the absence of her doctor, Alice has not noticed her new doctor has an accent, perhaps Russian or Polish. As the doctor scrawls down a note on a clipboard, Alice searches for a name tag. The new doctor is unlabelled.

"Shouldn't you be wearing a name tag?" she asks.

"Probably." She glances up briefly and makes another note. Her eyes are violet.

"Who are you?" Alice is suddenly indignant. "What happened to Dr Jaeger?"

"His son's birthday is today."

Alice persists "What's your name? Are you really a doctor or did you just sneak in to antagonise the patients?"

"Antagonise? I am not antagonising you I am evaluating your condition, which the hospital would not allow anyone but a doctor to do. Give me your arm please."

She obliges. The doctor gently examines her arm. The room is filled with the scratch of the pen for a moment, then she stows the clipboard inside a pocket that should not be big enough to hold it comfortably. "The hospital has recommended a special treatment for your condition Ms Kirkland. If you'll just put these on (she hands Alice a pile of clothes she recognises as her own, from home) then I'm going to take you to a specialised ward where we'll begin the treatment."

"I'm not going anywhere with you until I know your name."

The doctor smiles. "Ah, how rude of me, I forgot I had forgotten to mention my name. It's Braginskaya. Now please, the team is waiting."

For the second time that day, Alice begrudges a wave of relief. She feels it upon hearing Dr Braginskaya had brought a wheelchair. Her legs are still somewhat wobbly having only been used to carry her to her private bathroom and back. Being dressed in her own clothing has made her much more relaxed, although she has no idea how the hospital got it.

"How did you get my clothes?" she looks down at the shorts and the tank top she struggled into moments ago and wonders why they didn't get her something warmer "Did my brother bring them?"

She bites her lip at the thought of her brother stealing into her apartment with the spare key under the mat and pawing through her belongings, rifling through her clothes to choose the most inconvenient outfit he could piece together.

"No, he didn't. We haven't heard from your family yet, although we tried contacting them when you first arrived. I'm sure they will reply soon."

Alice shakes her head "They won't. Can I have a blanket please? I'm not dressed that warmly."

To her surprise, the doctor takes off her own coat and drapes it over Alice. "We don't have the time to fetch you one right now. Take this for now, and we'll get something more suitable after the treatment has begun." She slips the clipboard out of the pocket and stows it inside a second jacket she wore underneath the coat.

Dr Braginskaya rolls her down a bustling hall, full of nurses and gurneys and family members following doctors. The smell of blood introduced itself to Alice in the agonising moment of consciousness directly after she was hit. The smell waves to her from several doorways as she is pushed past. After a few glimpses of patients far worse off than her, Alice choses to look ahead and ignore the whispers and the sobs. She finds herself speaking again.

"What is this treatment? I wasn't aware anything could be done for broken bones and cuts apart from a cast and stitches."

They turn a corner which is much darker than the last hallway.

"The treatment is difficult to explain. It is better that you experience it for yourself, rather than me describing it for you. Trust me this will be very helpful to you."

Eventually they arrive at a brown door. Alice guesses they are very deep into the hospital, as she has not seen anyone else in a while and she can no longer hear the whir of life support machines or the moans of those less fortunate than her. Dr Braginskaya opens the door onto a room Alice suspects she might have once visited in her nightmares.

In the centre of the room stands a table equipped with straps to hold down a recalcitrant patient's arms and legs. A little table stands next to it, holding a row of shiny instruments honed for slicing and cutting. Alice surveys the empty room, observing the darkness and sinister details with increasing alarm. "You really are a madwoman who sneaked in, aren't you?"

Dr Braginskaya chuckles "I promise I am not. These instruments are not for you. Whoever had this room last must have forgotten to clean these up after their session." Her bandaged hand rests on Alice's shoulder for a moment, than she sweeps into the room and shoves the table into a dark corner.

Alice stands up with some difficulty. Refusing Dr Braginskaya's offer of help, she manages to reach the table and leans on the edge.

"I'm going to give you a prescription now. It is very important you keep these nearby in case of an emergency." The doctor presses a large jar filled to the brim with multi-coloured pills into her hand. "The instructions are inside the lid."

She regards the pills uneasily. Whatever is wrong with her, it must be serious to produce this amount of medication to treat the condition. Even as she examines them, she is sure she can feel a pain in her side growing, and her arm aching. The room doubles and blurs in front of her eyes. Her legs tip to the side. The doctor's arms wind around her and stretch her out carefully upon the table, slipping the pills into the pocket of Alice's borrowed coat.

"I feel faint." she addresses the ceiling. In the background, there is a ripping noise, rather like paper being shredded. Her right arm feels much lighter suddenly "I suppose one would feel rather faint after a bout of exertion if one has not moved for a time."

"You are fine." says Dr Braginskaya.

There is a rustle of leather and Alice finds when she attempts to lift her arm to clear the hair out of her eyes, she cannot. "Could you get the hair out of my eyes?"

The doctor does.

"When does the treatment start? Where is this team you were talking about?" asks Alice, although she could not be less interested at this point as she realises the overhead lights are shining right into her eye, which is very uncomfortable despite their weakness.

"You'll see them soon."

Alice feels a flipping sensation in her stomach. Her body becomes very heavy and it feels as if her waist and wrists are supporting her entire weight. Blinking, Alice opens her eyes. The table has been turned upright. A few feet beneath her, the ground has dropped away in a circle about five feet wide. Her body is aligned with it. If the straps- yes it is the straps holding her upright- were loosened she would slip through into the deep black shaft yawning at her. The doctor stands in front of her.

She reaches over the hole and slips a cold, sharp object into Alice's pocket.

Her breathing grows shallower. "What is this?"

"A tad frightening I imagine." the doctor has secured her to the table and turned it upright, so that if even one of the straps now holding her slips Alice is likely to fall into the abyss. "I would not worry. If you keep your wits about you and pick your companions carefully, Alice, you should succeed."

Dr Braginskaya snaps her fingers. The four straps fall away. Alice falls into the dark before she has time to scream.

**This story will feature a great many of the original cast of the Carroll books. It's going to be too damn easy to guess who is who, but then again Wonderland is more about nonsense than it is mystery. A free internet cookie to anyone who can tell me who Dr Braginskaya is from the landslide of obvious clues they have received. Anyone?**


	2. 2-Still falling

Alice's last glimpse of the world is Dr Braginskaya's pleasant smile and the halo of not quite white hair framing her face. The blackness of the shaft quickly swallows her up. Alice screams. Ten seconds later her hip is struck by a metal surface. The shaft becomes a literal shaft, something like an endless horizontal air vent. Everything is bright again. The air howls, the panels of the grey shaft flash by at a dizzying speed. Whatever strange source lights her way is invisible and offers no heat, so Alice feels the cold slice through her thin shorts and top easily. The borrowed coat flaps over her head, also useless against the cold of the fall unless she can somehow persuade the coat to hug her body- which is very unlikely.

She breaks off her scream and looks past her feet at the endless drop beneath her. "Fuck's sake!"

Normally Alice doesn't resort to such vulgarities to emote, but in this case she thinks she might forgive herself. Besides, the wind snatches away her words before she can hear them.

Just when Alice thought the vent would never end, there is a splash, her body shakes with an icy shock and her mouth fills with water. Coughing, she fights towards the surface and only notices in passing her right arm is now free of the cast she is to wear for several months while the bone repairs and it is functioning fine despite its fracture. She bursts through to the surface.

This place is a vast sea of water, boiling with a storm further than the eye can see in every direction. The ceiling is so far above it is lost in shadow.

A wave crashes down upon her head. Alice barely has time to spew out water and replace it for more air before she is sucked into the trough of another wave and crushed again. The waves toss their new plaything about, taking turns to force her underwater and seep between her lips, then to fling her back to the surface and sweep her along to the next player. Alice does not enjoy the game. Her eyes squeezed tight, she curls into a ball praying with all her might the sea will calm. The waves spin and push her about for half a minute. Her lungs are slowly burning, her head a sear of pain.

_I wonder if one grows up in heaven. I wonder if I shall see them walking and talking and laughing. I wonder; did they go to heaven at all? Or were they recycled and given to another mother?_

Alice opens her mouth, intending to fill her lungs so she may finally answer her questions. But when she opens her mouth, water spills out and air rushes in to take its place. Alice is falling again.

Above, she can see another black hole set into an earthen roof, leaking a stream of water. It is this waterfall Alice is now caught inside. She fancies she must look like a nymph riding a tsunami to the centre of the earth to any observers. She is still falling of course, only now she is up to the waist in a jet of water apparently too concentrated to break up into mist as it should have done metres ago. Good thing too; the dissipation of the water would mean Alice would be left tumbling over and over in empty space.

"I don't suppose I'll die now." she mutters "If I were going to die I would have been drowned. Well, I've been without them for six years and there is certainly no immediate need for us to meet. There's always a chance this fall will end and I will splat anyways. If that's true than at least I've been given a few more moments to prepare myself." Unable to stand the roaring silence –the water makes no noise- Alice fills the void with her loud musings "Let me see, have I any regrets-apart from flushing them of course. Oh, that blasted book. If I had known I was going to be dropped into the centre of the earth by a madwoman I would have read a diverting book. What the fuck was it on about?"

"Language!" scolds a voice. Alice searches for the source frantically. Nothing.

She summons her courage and looks beneath her. The floor is grinning. Past her feet she spies a needle-sized grin carved into the floor in pure white light impossibly far beneath her. The smile is shaped like a crescent with two full-moon eyes gleaming above. The grin is not so small now. Even as she watches it swells and expands at such a rapid rate her eyes cannot track it. She is falling towards an enormous luminous carving from an extreme height.

"Did you speak?" she asks the face.

"No." it says. The grin splits open. In a flash of white teeth Alice is swallowed up.

This time she remembers to scream. After a brief spell of blackness she is spat out into the light.

There are not words in her repertoire of curses sufficient to describe her shock at finding herself falling through what looks like a pawn shop set up in the core of the earth. The wares are stacked on shelves of dirt which line the walls. A great many of them are falling down the empty space in the middle with Alice.

"A junk shop in the middle of the earth." she muses aloud. "And I suppose the patrons would be winged. Then I wonder am I falling through the aisle? Well, dreams don't have to make sense."

Funnily enough it has not occurred to her that she is dreaming until now and suddenly everything resolves itself into a sensible explanation. "Of course I'm dreaming! This must be a product of my hyperactive imagination, augmented by the drugs. God am I stupid. I actually thought this was real. Won't make that mistake again…nothing to do but wait until the bottom is almost in sight. After all every dreamer wakes up just before they hit the bottom."

With this revelation Alice has achieved some sort of strange weightlessness. She still falls, but the pace of the fall is much slower and relaxed. The wind no longer slaps her about. It has become a breeze, gentle enough to allow her to pull the borrowed coat around herself for warmth. She surveys her surroundings, flashing by so quickly she catches just the barest glimpses: jars of preserves, animal foetuses suspended in viscous liquids, various human parts she doesn't want to identify also in liquids, rows of books using bones as the bookends, heaps of clothing old and new, furniture arranged in set-ups as if they are inside homes rather than on the shelves of dirt in the middle of the earth and objects of all other descriptions. A chessboard nearly hits her at one point. It whistles past her head at an alarming rate, closely followed by its pieces which rain down around Alice like a volley of arrows.

The White Queen is the only to actually strike her. The crown tears across her cheek, leaving a red line in its wake. Blood floats from the cut in red orbs and is swiftly sucked away by the wind. Seconds later a deck of cards flies from a desk, dragged by her velocity as she passes. Alice covers her face with a sleeve to prevent more cuts, hoping the cards will be taken in another direction by the wind. When next she looks up the cards are gone and the ground is much too close for comfort.

_Wake up_ she urges herself.

The ground is earthen. If she hits it at this speed, there will be a great deal of pain packed into a micro second then she will fall through a different type of darkness. The pain of this incredible fall will surely succeed the car's impact.

_I suppose I'll wake up when I hit the ground. Or I'll see them. At this point I wouldn't mind either option._

The ground rushes up to meet her.

Reality is not quite what Alice expects. She lies on her back upon a curved checked floor beside a candelabrum someone thought appropriate to place in the middle of the floor. Bizarrely, every piece of the candelabrum point rigidly upwards, even the pieces that are supposed to dangle, as if attracted by a powerful magnet.

Alice looks upwards and sees the floor above her "I'm on the ceiling."

As if taking a cue, the room tips upside down and dumps Alice on the floor.

Ignoring the pains, she jumps to her feet and yells "I've had quite enough of falling thank you very much!"

Nothing replies. The ceiling is high and curved, the room lit by the candelabrum. The room is conical in shape and every four feet there is a door in the wall. The doors are of varying sizes, shapes and materials. The largest is made of a solid sheet of metal which stretches right up to the ceiling. The smallest is no more than a foot tall and made of wood and has a carefully crafted doorknob shaped like a human face. A glass table stands in the centre of the room. On it there are two neatly wrapped packages of brown paper accompanied by a note on each.

Alice picks up the note on the first package, which seems to be a small bottle. The note reads: DRINK ME.

The second note on the smaller rectangular package: EAT ME.

Alice squints. Without her glasses it is very difficult to see what the lettering says, despite block capitols. Out of habit she pats her shorts pocket, feeling for the bulge of her glasses case. To her surprise her hand brushes the familiar case when she searches. For the past nine days she has only worn her glasses on the rare occasions she felt compelled to watch the daytime drivel on the TV. She distinctly remembers leaving her glasses on the bedside table on top of that stupid book when Dr Braginskaya took her away. And here they are, in her hand. Her right hand. Wait a second, isn't it fractured? And when did the cast come off?

_She must have given me the glasses when she put me on the table._ Wondering what other goodies the doctor might have stuffed her pocket with before she tipped Alice into the earth, Alice searches her pockets. Her finger is cut by a very sharp object in a pocket of the borrowed coat. Chasing the object, Alice discovers a scalpel – one of the instruments Dr Braginskaya claimed was not for her. Evidently this one is intended for her use. Aside from the scalpel and the prescription she already knew she had her search yields nothing.

The next thing to do is to try opening all the doors. Each and every single one is locked. Although she entertains no frivolous notions of somehow coaxing her body through the tiny door should it open, she gives it a try too. No joy.

She sits down beside the table to think "Let's look at this sensibly. I'm probably just under anaesthetic which is giving me insanely lucid drug-dreams. None of this is real. It's all a dream. The pain feels realistic because I know what pain feels like in the waking world. In a moment I'm going to wake up swathed in bandages with a pounding headache, a dozen more stitches and another giant scar." Not exactly comforting, but far superior to the alternative.

The temperature drops quite suddenly. Alarmed to see her breath steaming in the air, Alice jumps up and makes a fresh attack on the doors. The last stretch of the fall did not dry her, though logic dictates it should have.

Apparently logic is an unwelcome guest in this dream.

The doors are uncooperative. Ice has begun to form in strands of her hair. Seeing no alternative –apart from freezing to death- Alice snatches up the first package and strips away the wrapping. She was right; it is a small bottle. The label on the front is blank. She turns it over searching for any indication the contents might be poisonous.

"Here goes one of the dumbest things I've done so far." She says and uncorks the bottle.

The first sip burns her throat like wine, but without warming her up. On the contrary it forms a knot in the pit of her stomach which seems to draw all the warmth in her body to a fist-sized point in her abdomen. Alice doubles over, her throat too raw to manage another scream. The knot is so hot she fully expects her skin to start bubbling and popping like grease in a hot pan, her organs to drip out of her melting flesh. Eventually the heat ceases to be searing. The warmth returns to the limbs it borrowed from. With a supreme effort Alice straightens up. While Alice was curled in agony the room has taken it upon itself to worsen her situation by growing at least 10 times bigger. The walls are at least two stories in height, the doors are so massive Alice would need the help of a giant (or possibly an average-sized person) to have any hope of opening them now. Metres above her head sits the bottle which she hastily returned to the table during the initial pangs. In relation to her current size the bottle has become a behemoth shadow. No hope of retrieving it.

"Looks like I'm the right size for the elf door."

It occurs to Alice there is a system to the predicament she has stumbled into, so she applies herself to the task of sussing it out as she walks across the substantial length of tile between her and the door. "Right, I've been shrunk to a size that fits through this little door which I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of getting through before. The drink that shrank me was set out on the table. The package next to it, let's say that's a second funny-shaped bottle which reverses the effects of the bottle I drank from. Now why would there be a second bottle? What do I have to go back for if I'm supposed to go through this door?"

The answer is simple: the little door is locked. No matter how hard she yanks on the eerily accurately shaped face/door knob, the door refuses to budge.

Glancing back up at the table, she spots a third shadow sitting in line with the bottle and other package. A key.

"That's kinda ruddy useless isn't it?" she grumbles. "How the fuck am I supposed to get up to that key without a staircase? I suppose I'll sprout a pair of wings and fly up, shall I?"

She jams her hands in her pockets. Unfortunately she forgot the scalpel is in there, and she jerks back her throbbing hand with the instrument mounted in the skin between two of the knuckles on her left hand. The blade is sticking out of her palm on the other side. Sucking a breath past her teeth, Alice grips the handle and pulls it out as fast. Her fingers slip on the handle and she ends up adding a fresh injury to her right hand, slicing a good chunk of the top of her finger off. A fifth of her right first finger lies on the floor in a puddle of blood, complete with the fingernail.

"Okay." Alice surprises herself by refraining from shrieking like a child "I just cut a piece of my finger off. That shouldn't be fatal unless the wound gets infected. Let's hope the genius bastard who built this door and thought up the delightful system to go with it has some rubbing alcohol. Better yet why don't I just find Dr Braginskaya? She can fix this up for me, plus fix whatever I decide to inflict upon her when I FIND THAT ABSOULTELY BONKERS WITCH!...and now I'm ranting about a figment of my imagination."

Still this accident provides more evidence for her dream theory- surely if this were reality Alice's hands would be buzzing with pain. They only ache a little. Her whole body shivers from the chill of the room. Breath leaves her lips as twists of steam, pathetically small in the vast room. Touching the table leg, she finds it smooth and unsuitable for climbing. If she tries to shimmy up it she'll zoom back to the ground in seconds. After wrapping a handkerchief she finds in the coat around her finger, Alice decides to test the strength of the coat's belt. To her surprise when she places a foot against the leg and leans back so all her weight is upon the belt, looped around the width of the leg with either end grasped tight in her fists, the belt does not snap or unravel. It supports her perfectly.

"I can do this." she says.

And is in slow, painstaking steps, she does. Her feet are bare and easily grip the slippery surface of the leg to push her body up as she slides the belt up the thick leg and pulls. Once or twice she slips and snaps her legs shut around the leg. Each time she loses a few precious inches, she bites her lip, her determination renewed. "If Mulan can do it Alice can do it." she mutters under her breath.

Once she reaches the top of the leg, there is a ledge where the leg curves in under the glass table top. She wriggles into the slim gap. Slumped over the gap, she catches her breath and marvels at the numbness of her hands. Since the injury she hasn't felt a single twinge of pain. Almost as if she was never injured in the first place.

But her hands glisten with blood. She made fists to pull herself along which has ripped the wound in her knuckles further and encouraged the flow of blood from her finger to go from a fountain to an absolute river, which trickles down the leg of the table in alarmingly large streaks. The handkerchief is nearly soaked through. It will have to suffice for the moment.

Making her way to the key, Alice decides immediately she has no hope in hell of lifting the key. Even if she rolled it the edge somehow she'd never have the strength to lift the key, align it with the keyhole and turn it to unlock it. Before the accident and the weeks of idleness in hospital Alice would have had no hope of turning the key, now the same size as her. Forget lifting it.

She shields her eyes from the glare of the candelabrum and looks up at the bottle. Risking another swig will probably shrink her to the size of a dust mote. Besides, scaling the slippery summit of the bottle will be nigh on impossible- the belt cannot fit around the width and the glass is much more slick than the material of the table leg. Best leave it alone for now.

Alice produces the troublesome scalpel from her pocket and uses it to slit the paper of the second package open. She slips her hands through the opening she has made and rips outwards, creating a hole. The ripping is a roll of thunder at her size. Once the hole has become big enough, she grabs a strip and tugs it sideways. Soon she has walked the width of the package and torn the wrapping into two halves. One half is removed with much tugging and swearing.

The second package is a box shut with a clasp. Alice jerks the latch free and, summoning her feeble strength, she lifts the heavy lid and eases it backwards. A pastry is nestled inside the box. A pastry roughly the length of a Queen-sized mattress to little Alice. Big Alice could have fit it in her palm.  
A poof of frosted sugar puffs up around Alice's fist as she takes a pinch of the green pastry. The colour reminds her of wet moss on a rock at the seaside. Until this moment she has never found the colour particularly appetising, but when her stomach growls at the promise of some form of dream-sustenance it occurs to her her stomach must be shrivelled to the size of a dried apricot. Apparently one gets hungry in dreams.

The taste of the cake is not unlike the scorched bagels she often wrenches from the smoking toaster on mornings she is already running late for university. Those mornings she ends up flying down the stairs with half a bagel sticking out of her mouth, her bag sloppily packed and her hair suggesting she had spent the night under a thorn bush in the company of hedgehogs. How much fun it is to run into the street so messy and harassed and looking a little bit dangerous, to have fellow pedestrians catch sight of her and reel away in repulsion and shock at her demented appearance, and to have them never guess the crazy girl with the hedgehog-hair is actually a stuffy snob.

Sometimes Alice likes to pretend she turned out differently. These feelings only last as long as it takes to get to the bus, where she'll eat her poor imitation of a breakfast, tug her bedhead into bunches then feel a fool for her behaviour and wonder how many people she offered a Lector-ish smile on the way to the bus.  
Yes. This pastry tastes of home.

The pastry's effects were the exact opposite of the drinks.  
Alice feels a chill. The room's temperature has been dropping rapidly since she arrived and now it seems to have reached the arctic. She glances at her hands to make sure she's not frostbitten (knowing full well frostbite will never set in so quickly in the real world but factoring in the illogical rules of the dream) and sees they are growing. All of her is growing in sporadically, like her body is composed of balloons being inflated at different times.

"Fuckin' hell." She groans and jumps off the table.

By some miracle or twist of good dream-luck Alice manages to swell to the size of a large poodle by the time she hits the ground, so the fall does not break her little bones the way she expected. Unfortunately the inflation stops at poodle-size. Alice kneels on the cold tile for a moment. She stands up quite calmly, rubs her stinging rump and examines the threads of red she left on the table leg. Then she kicks the whole goddamn thing over. Glass flies everywhere. Cuts line her bare legs. A piece the size of the tip of her remaining first finger lodges itself above her left eyebrow.

The glass is picked out and flicked into a corner. Alice feels better for having shattered the source of much trouble, if a little guilty about destroying another's property. Who would own a place like this?

Heavens knows –a weird figment of her imagination who will reveal themselves presently to bemoan the loss of the table.

Alice retrieves the pastry in its box from the wreck of glass and pinches another bite off. A few more pinches later she has returned to her modest original height. The bottle must be fashioned of tougher-than average glass, she thinks to herself as she picks up the unbroken bottle from shards. The key is trapped under the table leg decorated with her blood. She lifts the heavy, thick metal with difficulty and pitches it to the side.

"How am I going to do this?"

**Poor Alice. I wonder, are her numerous injuries a metaphor for something deeper and darker, some theme lurking in the subtext, or do is the author simply a sadistic bastard who enjoys writing her characters (who she does not actually own) through rough times because it's fun? The answer: a little of both.**


	3. 3- Them

**I don't own Hetalia nor the original work of Alice in Wonderland. I don't have all that much to discuss yet- this being the infancy of the fic. Apart from the fact that the POVS will jump around a little, and that I am going to use both genderbent and original versions of the cast because I write better with a more equal mix of the genders, although the cast is probably going to be overwhelmingly female. Oh and my thanks for reading this. I hope you enjoy it.**

It takes Sakura a moment to confirm Monika is, in fact, completely frozen and probably not of her own volition.

She stands in the yard, the load of firewood she gathered from the woodshed prior to this current motionless state rests still in the crook of one strong arm, while her other arm hangs at her side, the axe dangling from it limply. Her woollen tunic is soaked around an area it is unfortunate for a woman's tunic to become see-through. In the initial moments of Monika's motionlessness Sakura poured what of the stream-water from her bucket over her friend's head, hoping to shake her out of it. When this endeavour bore no fruit, Sakura gave her a smart kick in the shins and failed to shift her even an inch. This is not unusual considering Monika's impressive strength, but kicking her felt as if she had booted a stone rather than a column of sinew. Sakura hopped around on one foot clutching the injured appendage for a moment, muttering a stream of thinly disguised euphemisms. Monika didn't react.

Defeated, Sakura cups her hands about her mouth and shouts to the topmost window for Chun-Yun. Her sister's dark hair precedes her head out the window as she ducks through it, a towel hung on her shoulders "Who dares to disturb me during bath time?" she says drily.  
"Nik is frozen."  
"What?"  
"Look at her. She won't move."

Indeed the only part of Nik currently on the move is her braid, which the wind is tossing around her head.

"Monika!" calls Chun-Yun. "What's wrong?"

She doesn't answer.

"Monika Beilschmidt!" Sakura watches Chun-Yun's hair brush sail from the window and miss Nik by a wide margin. It lands on the roof of the woodshed, spooking a flock of butterflies from the flowerbeds. Sakura ducks the storm of colourful wings and toasted bodies, and notice through the hands she raises to protect her eyes Nik doesn't so much as blink as a blizzard of bugs buzzes past. When they are gone she is left with a smear of charred butter on the bridge of her nose and one of the six of some poor bug's wing stuck on her cheek. And still she stares, unblinkingly at the forest flat horizon ahead. If she was staring at the forest to the West of the house Sakura wouldn't think it unusual. The forest is definitely worthy of her unbroken attention.

But the heaths in the East? What have they to offer, excepting the shadowy- smudge of the ruins of Heartopolis miles into the distance. Apart from that it is only blasted plains and straggling shrubbery far into the distance, the muddy ribbons of the oft-trodden roads and the ashy ribbon of the river and the verdant wall of the border of the forest. On second thought maybe that is a lot to offer…

Beautiful to the eye of an appreciator of a lover of minimalism, which Nik may be, but she rarely takes a moment to enjoy their surroundings with the amount of work needing to be done around the Inn.

Chun-Yun hops on the drainpipe and shimmies down, apparently forgetting she is only dressed in her bathrobe and the towel on her shoulders, and snaps her fingers in front of Nik's face. To no avail of course.

Her face crumples into a frown "Nik? Can you hear me?" she decides she cannot after a pause and turns to Sakura "How long has she been this way?"  
"Three minutes?"

Chun-Yun presses her ear against Monika's substantial breast "Her heart beats. Her lungs are filling and emptying. Her blood is warm…a prank maybe?"  
"I wasn't aware Nik has a sense of humour."

"She fell off her stool the time Micha snorted while he drank and beer came out of his nose."

"_Hai_…but I do not think she would ever prank anykind*."

"She isn't blinking."  
Peeling the wing off her cheek, Chun-Yun reaches in to swipe the butter off just as Monika returns to her senses with an ear-splitting shriek. She drops to her knees, the wood rolling away, and grips her head in her hands. Her tooth punctures her lip and blood spills down her chin. Micha appears from nowhere and gathers her up quickly. By now her scream has dwindled to the type of shallow, sharp, frantic breaths Sakura hears when she gives water to the most gravely injured of the party of wounded in a Board. Micha tugs Nik's hands away from her temples where her nails have gouged bleeding furrows. He takes one hand and Sakura stoops to take the other. She doesn't care much when Nik's nails begin to dig into the back of her hand.

"What happened?" demands Micha.

"I don't know-" begins Sakura. She is cut off by the same scream - issuing from Chun-Yun this time.

"Hold Nik." Orders Micha. He reaches Chun-Yun just in time to catch her head in his lap and pins her arms to the earth so she can't scratch herself up too.

"What in the consecrated creation is going on?" Micha glares in the direction of the forest "Did something come out of the forest?"

Sakura isn't listening. Instead, she is peering through Nik's tunic at a spot just over her heart. Ignoring Micha's protests, she unlaces the cravat of her friend's tunic and lifts the edge of Nik's undershirt with her thumb, a few centimetres above her left breast. The colour drains from her face.

"Check Chun-Yun's leg."

"Her mark?"

"Pulsating."

Unfortunately for Micha, he leans over to confirm his suspicions in the exact moment Nik finally snaps back to reality.

"Feliciana!"

Far away in the heart of a city, another girl has become still. Her brother has her by the collar of her tunic and is shaking her violently, occasionally head-butting.

"Are you sleeping with your fucking eyes open now?! FELI! FELI! FELI, FELI, FELS, FELICIANA DAISY VARGAS, LOOK AT ME! NO DON'T LOOK OVER MY FUCKING SHOULDER LOOK AT ME! WHAT THE FUCK IS SO SAINT-DAMNED INTERESTING ON THE WALL? ARE YOU EVEN LOOKING AT THE WALL?" and so on and so forth.

Summoned by the upheaval, a tall boy ducks into the room. "Lovino! The hell're ya doin' to yer sister!"

He separates them easily, holding the flailing boy back with a hand over his face and supporting the vacant looking girl with an arm around her shoulders.

"Feli?" her eyes are blank.

"S'wrong with her?"

"I was trying to figure that out you bearish asshole!" cries Lovino, muffled by the palm smothering his mouth.

"Or tryin' to rip her head off."

"Lemme go Berwald!"

He does. Both boys stare at her for a moment. Soon they are joined by a younger girl who wriggles in between them. She gasps when she sees Feli. "Blimey! Crikey! Bugger my aunt! She's finally been tipped from her rocker then? That's what comes from a near all-pasta diet I suppose."

"Hush Pen." snaps Lovino.

When Feliciana's scream begins it shocks two of them so badly Pen dives for safety behind the table and Lovino follows. Berwald remains unflinching.

He draws his hand back and delivers a stinging slap to the right side of Feli's face. Immediately she snaps out of whatever trance she was in.

"Hey!" she squeaks indignantly and smacks Berwald back, although it does more damage to her little hand than his face. "What was that for?"

"You were screamin' yer fool head off."

"Was I?"

"No of course not!" Lovino's head pops over the top of the couch "I'm hiding back here with Pen because we're gonna build a fucking fort, not because you started shrieking like a banshee and scared the shit outta everykind but Senor Stoic!" and he adds after a thought "Stupid bastard!" then retreats behind the sofa again in case she does something weirder.

"You're sure you don't remember a thing?" asks the woman.

The two boys shake their heads at the same time, as is their odd custom. "Not a darn thing." says the one with longer hair.

His brother nods "You sure we really screamed and stuff?"  
The woman puts his hand gently to his temple and shows him his blood, shining on his palm. "I'm sure _chére_."

"What does it mean?" asks the one with the longer hair, touching his forehead.

"It means…your Suit (the boys flinch at the word and look towards the closed window in fear) has just become a little more complete."

The taller boy rolls the sleeve of his trousers up and stares at a spot on the inside of his leg he would never uncover outside of the privacy of the room they sit in. "Ew…check out my leg Mattie, it's throbbing."

"Mine too." his brother rolls up his sleeve and points to the mark on the ball of his shoulder "So…who have we gained Cescie**?"

Cescie looks out the window for a long moment, at the street beneath them. She closes the shutters and whispers: "Alice."

Far away, picking herself up from yet another tumble down yet another long shaft, dusting off her borrowed coat, wincing at the sudden flaring pain in her mutilated hand and wondering where the hell she has landed this time, is Alice.

***Term for 'anybody' or 'anyone'**

****pronounced 'chess-key'**

**Just some clarifications: Micha is Belarus and no, he is not named after the incomparable Misha Collins, Micha is an actual Russian name. Not to say that I don't love Misha. I was an avid participant in the great Mishapocalypse. I love Misha.**


	4. 4-still them

**Well I'm cringing at the layout of the last chapter. I'm sorry, I'll make the transitions more clear from now on.**

Blood is not an uncommon sight at the Wandering Knave Inn, with the droves of drunken suits and sets passing through each week, it is more remarkable when the week passes without the spilling of blood upon the property. However the blood doesn't often end up on Micha's face- not his own at least. He sits at the long table in the kitchen, his head titled back and a wad of red tissues held to his nose. His white-blonde hair is peppered with flecks of red, his dark eyes set in a glare that follows Nik around the kitchen as she collects the materials necessary to repair his damaged visage. Still dressed in her bathrobe and nothing else, Chun-Yun sits on the counter massaging her temples, cursing under her breath in a language seldom heard in Wonderland. At the sink is Sakura finishing up the work she and Nik had been slogging through before she froze, unfroze and assaulted Micha.

"At least it's not broken." Nik sits beside Micha and begins to dab at his nose around the tissues.

"Feels broken to me." he squeezes his eyes tight against the pain speaking in his congested voice brings him.

"It's not." says Sakura. "Remember the way your sister's nose looked when she broke it? Yours looks nothing like that."  
"My sister's nose-" Micha swallows his retort in favour of a grumpy silence as more blood seeps from beneath the tissues with the effort of speaking.

"Is considerably larger than yours _ja_," Nik peels the soaked tissues away and inspects her handiwork "Damn. I got you good. But I don't think your nose is broken."

"Do you have to talk so loudly?" groans Chun-Yun loudly from the counter.

Nik doesn't bother to point out the conversation has barely progressed above sullen mutters "Sorry about this."

He grunts.

"In all fairness, I did find you peeling my wet tunic off. How was I supposed to interpret that as anything but sexual assault?"

Sakura nods in agreement.

Chun-Yun jumps off the counter and drops into the seat beside Micha, suddenly full of energy. "Micha! You know what? I think we need to form the suit."

The room is silent apart from the rush of the water into the sink and the chatter of the birds outside. Sakura is aware of her hands working at the plates in the sink, but not of why she needs to. Even if the boss will be displeased with the dishes left she doubts his displeasure will be the worst of her problems. Far from it. Just bringing up the damned idea Chun-Yun has fired into the room has destroyed the last few years, the peace they have all had to work together to preserve, and now the scars they have tried to forget are bubbling to the surface. Sakura supposes she should be angry at Chun-Yun for deciding she has the right to wreck what they have all sacrificed to protect without consulting the rest of them, at least out of context, but she hasn't the energy nor desire.

"We should." she says. "Form the suit. It's about time we stopped…"

"Hiding." Nik presses a plaster over Micha's nose with the utmost care "This isn't hiding. This is a tactical retreat, isn't it?" she peers over her glasses at Sakura. "I've been hearing 'tactical retreat' for the last four years. Hiding would imply we have been beaten. Crushed, scattered and crippled, maybe, but we're not beaten yet."

With a supreme effort Micha makes a contribution: "Damn straight. Pack the shit."

Sakura can't help but look at her friends in surprise. All these years she had thought herself the only one who wanted to cast off the apron and don the armour under her cloak again. Nik never complains, and although Chun-Yun and Micha are extremely vocal about their hate for the particular line of work the four of them have been forced into, they have never shown any signs of wanting to return to the way they were. And yet even as Sakura watches, they are ready to shed the safe life they have spent so much time building…then again, perhaps it was only a cocoon, and cocoons are only a temporary place for one to rest their head during a long journey.

"What do we tell the boss?" asks Chun-Yun. For the first time in a long time, she is smiling.

"Tell him to go fuck himself. Or we're needed elsewhere. Either way, we won't be coming back any time soon." says Sakura then she tosses the dishes out the open window.

**Short chapter. I'm sorry. I didn't have much time to write today.**


	5. 5-Wonderland

After an embarrassing length of time spent attempting, Alice manages to get the door open (following a brief conversation with the doorknob which bit her with brass teeth when she tried to turn it) and falls one more time. This time she trips over a doorjamb and catches herself on a conveniently placed banister. The door slams shut behind her ("Good riddance!" sniffs the doorknob) and locks. Alice cannot return the way she came if she wants to- not that there is any conceivable way to ascend to the surface through the teeth, the subterranean junk shop, the storming ocean or the shaft.

"What the ruddy heck is this?" she demands of the silence.

Alice stands on the top step of a staircase at least a full story in height equipped with a dull metal banister. The stairs stand in the middle of what must have once been a large, bustling square. She cannot see much through the thick sheets of ash which hang in the air, but she seems to be in the midst of the remains of tall buildings. Balconies and sky-bridges connect the towers, each one curving upwards into the ash at graceful angles. Most of them have been shattered in some way. Rubble litters the street. A sizeable chunk lies at the bottom of the stairs. Somehow the staircase was left untouched when the city was sacked. Not even a blemish from the massive fire that must have gutted the city, the ashes from which clog the air Alice tries to breath. From the growth of vegetation upon the ruins she can tell these are indeed ruins of a city, abandoned long ago. Whatever foul force passed through here is long gone, although, from a low crackling noise in the distance, Alice guesses a few of the fires they started are still burning.

Slowly, she descends the stairs with an iron grip on the banister. Her footsteps are bounced back at her through the thick air, like headlights on a foggy day. She feels an apprehension similar to the type one feels when one stands at the mouth of a dark hallway; an inescapable certainty something is waiting in the shadows which will hasten to introduce itself the second she makes a misstep.

"Is someone there?"  
Alice freezes upon the penultimate step. She peers into her grey surroundings "Yes."

"How unusual." the voice bounces about the air like Alice's footsteps, making it impossible to pinpoint the source.

"Who are you?" she looks over her shoulder.  
"Get to know me before you ask such an intimate question."

She has heard enough of the voice to guess it belongs to a woman post-puberty and pre-menopause, maybe around her own age.

"Where are you?"  
"Tucked away."

"But where?"  
"Nearby."

"But where? Precisely, in relation to me."

"No idea. I can't see much with all this ash."

"Well neither can I, hence the questions."

Alice finally picks a human-ish shape out of the gloom. Her bare feet touch the cold floor, a beach of crushed flagstone and the earth it was laid over. She leaves a fine trail of blood in her wake. The drips falls from her fists as she squeezes them and her nails dig into the flesh of her palm. "I think I can see you."

"What do I look like?"  
"Kind of…slumped over? Kneeling on the floor."

"No. Don't touch that."

She continues heedless of the warning. The shape kneels at the far end of the square. It is indistinct, yet Alice feels the dread striking her afresh. The shape resolves itself. She stops a few feet short in front of the shape, the corpse, and takes in the charred quality of the bones. The apathy she surveys the corpse with shocks her. She doesn't care that this thing has been here so long whatever flesh was not scorched by the flames has rotted. She doesn't care the bones are turning to dust and a rib drops from the ribcage even as she watches, and falls into a pillow of dust and skeleton's knees and creates a mushroom of dust around her feet.

She only begins to care when the skull whips upwards and its empty sockets are aimed at her.

Alice backs up a few steps, but her curiosity will not allow her to run. The skull's jaw snaps open and shut, the skull shudders. It must be searching for her.

"Don't agitate them." says the woman wearily "They just fell asleep."

**Welcome to Wonderland.  
The exits are sealed.**


	6. You' or 'it'

Alice backs away on the balls of her heels, hating each tiny padding noise her feet make on the flagstones. With the absence of its ears, logic dictates the skull should not be able to hear her, and yet even without its eyes the skulls seems to have no trouble looking about itself. What does logic know? It dictates a skeleton ash from the waist is dead and will not move unless moved by another party, but this skeleton is moving with something that strikes Alice as dangerously close to a will and intelligence. She longs for the woman to speak again, but her fear keeps her own lips sealed and she cannot bring herself to ask for advice. Alice's bare toes scrape painfully against a piece of jagged stone. She lifts her left leg into the air behind her delicately, searching for something she might trip over. A piece of indented column lies directly in her path so she corrects it by a few inches and skirts around it with a narrow berth. The skeleton stares at her. The sockets burn into her more fiercely than all but one of the stares she has ever faced in her life.

Eventually she backs right into the staircase. The banister jabs the small of her back.

_Speak_, she urges the woman.

She does : "You haven't touched it, have you?"

"No! What should I do? Apart from not touching it?"

"Ignore it."

"Ignore it?!"

"Yes. Ignore it, because it only woke up when you acknowledged it, so don't. Believe me interacting with the corpses doesn't do anything but encourage them, like a bad partner. Dump it."

"What are you going on about?"

"Dump it! It's no good for you! All it is going to do is entice you closer and closer with the promise of some sort of bastardised love, which I'm sure a young hungry heart such as yours yearns for, then pin you down with its naked ribs while it flays you."

Alice bites back a laugh when she hears the woman utter the word 'love'. "So if I leave it, the skeleton won't come after me."

Quite suddenly the skeleton lurches forward out of its pool of ash and begins scrabbling in her direction. Swallowing a shriek, Alice vaults over the banister with a dexterity that surprises her and hot-foots it to the top of the stairs. The door has disappeared for some reason, but she doesn't plan to run back inside in the first place.

"Ah dammit." groans the woman from deep in the ash "Naming is bad. Don't name what you don't know."

"I didn't bloody name it!" retorts Alice "I just said 'the skeleton'!"

Said skeleton's efforts triple on the ground. It finds the shrapnel Alice dodged and rips at it with bone digits that score deep furrows in the rock before it apparently realises its prey is made of stone.

"Let's avoid anything more personal than a pronoun. 'It' is the safest, but if you want to be a little daring and go for a 'her' or a 'him', then go ahead and take a risk."

"What should I do?"

"Stand still until it stops moving."

For the first five minutes Alice is content to stay quiet. Although she knows her voice is not going to stimulate the…it…if she refuses to mention it, she doesn't feel safe taking the chance for a while. The woman must feel the same. No words pass between them until: "Is it safe to name you?"

"Name me?"

"Yes. You're a woman, yeah?"

"Good guess."

"So…you are?"

"Yes, I have the parts necessary to qualify as a woman. And of course I identify myself as a woman which is the important factor."

"Can I ask your name?"

"Yes."

"I-if I do, will you tell me?"

"Not at the moment. We should at least get better acquainted before we decide to cosy up with names."

"Where I'm from names are the first things people tell each other."

"Strange. Well for me, I'm unaccustomed to being asked for my name in such a brief and direct manner. If you want to honour your customs then I suppose I'll step out of a few feet out of my comfort zone."

"Actually it makes sense to get to know the person before I name them. I guess."

"Anyhow it is rather awkward without names. If I need to warn you about something post-haste I can't just shout to the ash and hope you understand the message is meant for you."

"You could call me 'girl'."

"Nouns are dangerous. And if I resort to 'she' it could become a sort of proxy name…oh hell, we'll stick with 'you'. So if I yell 'watch out you', I'm addressing you, you."

"Uh, okay."

"Finding this difficult?"

"A little yes."

"It will become easier with practice. You'll be fine."

Alice resigns herself to being 'you' for the next few hours. She will call the woman 'you' as well, but think of her as the 'woman'. Surely it isn't dangerous to name a person, a thing, a whatever she's talking to, if it's only in her mind? The skeleton still drags itself about the floor by its bony arms. Two of its brittle fingers have already snapped off and its hip bones are quickly disintegrating as they are dragged all over the rough stone floor. Mercifully it has yet to discover the stairs. Hopefully the skeleton won't.

"Where am I?"

"Names. Dangerous."

"Oh for…what happened to this place? Fires?"

"Why ask if you have already guessed?"

"Because I only guessed. I need some confirmation."

"Why not trust your eyes and your lungs? You're breathing in the ash as you speak, it's so thick in the air you can't even make out me less than 200 feet in front of you. Why even ask?"

"You're so close?"

"Yes. I don't believe I stuttered."

"Well why didn't you come over here in the first place?! Save me the trouble of almost getting flayed by a-a-a…it!"

"I tried to stop you. Oh and I haven't got legs right now."

"What? What the hell are you on about?! Are you always like this?"

"If I remember correctly I think I am," she sounds as if she's genuinely straining to remember rather than being sarcastic. "I haven't needed to be 'me' or 'you' in a long time."

"And that means?"

"You'll find out. Soon as it behaves itself and plays dead again."

With this vague promise on her mind, Alice waits.

When Alice gathers the courage to step past the now inert…the inert threat, she is sure it will sink its cracked teeth into her ankle. But it does not. It does not even react to a drop of her blood which falls into its eye-socket and drips down its cheekbone as she passes. Alice strides past it, wanting to put as much distance between her and it as she can manage but she is unsure of which direction to take.

"Where are you?"  
"I am completely embarrassed to admit this, but I have forgotten." the woman's voice rings out from every direction. "This air is so damn full of ash I can't see an inch out of my window."

"A window. So you're in a building?"  
"No. Not really. Well of sorts, to me at least. It's more of a cell."

Her heart skips a beat. "Why are you in a cell?"  
"Not for a crime." The woman's voice becomes bitter "A crime I committed at any rate. You've little to fear from me."

"Little to fear," muses Alice "Meaning I do have something to fear."  
"Of course. I'm in this cell for a reason."

With the ash bouncing her voice in from every angle, the woman is still impossible to pinpoint from only this. Alice waves a hand in the air and watches with interest at the grey, sandy residue curls around her wrist or spirals away from her hand. It is like disturbing silt on the bottom of a riverbed. Her only option is to wade into the ash away from the staircase, which would be her only method of escape had the door not disappeared. Even though her steps are careful and measured she bumps into rubble every few steps. Each jarring collision brings a shooting reminder of the numerous cuts on her body and shakes loose a few more drips of blood. She needs to stop the bleeding soon. When she was a child, nosebleeds were among the common ailments her childhood was rife with and she used to faint all the time, clutching at a bloody nose with a scarlet sleeve. Like most of her problems the nosebleeds went away in her early teens, after the incident. Alice isn't at all unaccustomed to bleeding heavily or the sight of her own fluids, but she isn't used to not being able to dispose of the blood immediately. It is beyond disconcerting to have to stay in clothes stained with her blood.

She looks at the insides of her thighs and sighs with relief that there are not patches of blood above her knees, in embarrassing patches.

However the memories return even without blood in the particular place. Oh well. She has more pressing priorities at the moment. Besides the memories are rarely far from the front of her mind. Their red, they are the first thing she sees when she wakes up and looks at the ceiling, and seared into her eyelids every time she blinks, and the last thing she sees in the white pillow as she goes to sleep. They-OH SHIT!

Alice bumps right into a column exactly the same shade of the grey ash. The column shakes and as she peels away from it in a daze, something falls from the top of it. On a reflex she catches the falling object. She blinks a few times and registers the teapot in her hands.  
The tea pot is a dirty white with what seems to be a green keyhole which has been filled in mounted over the hole in the spout. The lid too, is welded shut with a thick brim of a material like solder around it. Alice uses her sleeve to rub some of the ash off the surface of the pot.

"If you're trying to spring me that's not going to work." says the woman's voice from inside the teapot.

**The next update isn't going to be on the regular Monday. I'm going to see some friends for a while during this half term and I won't have access to a computer during this time, so please accept my apology. And Jeez does that sound formal. Take care everybody.**


End file.
